I improvised a piano melody (the first thing you hear), then set to work. First, to translate it, I sent it to a toy piano synth and mercilessly quantized it onto the beat.
Then, to transliterate it, I ran it through Ableton’s “Scale” plugin to invert the intervals from the original (all C’s remained C’s, all D’s became B’s…I think, I didn’t really look too closely at what I was doing). For both of these, I added some random pitch variation to represent translation errors, noise, and/or artifacts.
Finally, to interpret it, I sped it up and made it two octaves higher, then told Ableton to change that to MIDI and play it on a synth. The new melody follows the contours of the original melody (perhaps).
I just came back from a retreat where we performed a lot of Pauline Oliveros, and I think I am in a meditative mood, so the piece unfolds pretty slowly and sparsely. The opening gestures come back sporadically to glue everything together.
